


Patience's Grief

by TrivialPursuit



Category: Elementary (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Family, Gen, Post - A Landmark Story, References to Suicide, Twelfth Night - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-28
Updated: 2013-05-28
Packaged: 2017-12-13 05:27:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 665
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/820529
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TrivialPursuit/pseuds/TrivialPursuit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>'Look what you've done,' it will say, 'Don't you just feel so guilty?'</p>
            </blockquote>





	Patience's Grief

**Author's Note:**

> In 'A Landmark Story', when Moran is given a choice between his sister's life and his, I wondered what his sister was doing as he smashed his head into the wall.  
> 

Professor Viola Moran sits in her little oak-panalled office, feet tucked up under her as she grades papers, a red pen tucked up in her slippery black hair, keeping it in an impromptu bun with another pen in her hand, viciously dancing across the papers of her students, creating harsh slashes of red words in the margins and occasionally the text itself. Normally Professor Moran uses a jolly green or deep purple for her marking, but today she finds the red ink particularly cathartic. A pair of round, tortoise-shell glasses perch on the tip of her nose, occasionally slipping, only to be saved at the last moment from falling to her desk and shoved back into place, awaiting the performance to repeat once more in a few minutes. 

Unbeknownst to Professor Moran, a thin, gangly man, not unlike the students who populate the hallowed halls of her university, sits several metres down from her door at the end of the hallway. A thin paperback is held loosely in one hand as he turns the page absently in perfect mimicry of reading, though who knows? Perhaps he is reading.

Nevertheless, in the left breast pocket of his faux army jacket, exactly like the ones that are currently  _en vogue_  among the student population, there is a phone. It is a a simple flip phone, one that would be considered out of date and unfashionable to this man's affected peers. Yet it is not the sort of phone that will be used as a status symbol among peers, indeed it is only intended to be used once. And so he sits waiting for a call that will tell him whether the woman who marks her student's papers in red ink three doors down from where he sits dies or if her brother makes an alternate decision.

In the outside pocket of an equally fashionable satchel sits a baton and a pair of medical gloves. The baton, the man knows, will cause a mess on the scratched wooden floor and crammed bookshelves of the office of the woman for whom the baton is intended. But, though not the man's preferred method, it will send a message to the brother of the woman. ' _Look what you've done, look how she suffered,_ ' it will say, ' _Don't you just feel so_ guilty _?_ '

The call comes and the young man gets up to leave, book still in his hand, and he walks down the hallway, passed the door where Viola Moran works studiously away. The only sound made as he exits stage left is by the rustle of the book as it drops from his hand and falls to the floor outside Professor Moran's door. She does not hear it though, and does not leave her office for several hours, when she receives a phone call telling her that her brother has bashed his head into the mirror of the prison in America where she did not know he was incarcerated. When she does find the book, hours later, she will laugh the strangled laugh of someone who thinks that what they're laughing at is absolutely Not Very Funny At All. She will pick the book up and pocket it, shelve it, and forget about it.

Some time later, after tears have been shed, the body has been shipped across the Atlantic and buried in the family plot in Hertfordshire, Viola will open the book, cracking the spine for the first time. She'll be confused when, despite the newness of the book, there will be a page dogeared, something which she rarely does with her books. A line is highlighted menacingly – though, with  the combination of neon colour and marker felt, Viola's not entirely sure how highlighting can be effectively menacing, yet there it is – and she reads it over with a shrivelling sense of dread pooling in the pit of her stomach. Viola Moran is no longer sure of anything anymore.

_She sat like patience on a monument,_

_Smiling at grief._

**Author's Note:**

> The last lines in the story come from Act II, Scene IV, lines 114-115 of William Shakespeare's 'Twelfth Night, or What You Will'. I know I sort of misuse them, since they are spoken by Viola in an attempt to over-exaggerate Olivia's grief to make Orsinio feel better, but it works.


End file.
